dalamb
Deity
Especially since you have to have Theology and thus access to Theocracy to build the AP in the first place.
BOTM 1 Final Spoiler
- Thread starter ainwood
- Start date
Munro
Deity
Finally finished - what a slog that was!
Got caught out by one of the random events right at the end: 'Russian soliders have shown unexpected mercy to our wounded...'
The options were
- 'Ha! Send out troops back to fight as soon as possible'
- 'Send emissiaries to discuss the possiblity of peace. (+1 relations boost with Stalin).'
There was no explicit mention of peace so I chose the second option and then found myself locked into a 10 turn peace treaty with Stalin! About 6 turns before I was about to finish wiping out his cities to reach the domination limit...
So this cost me about 10 turns at the end.
Very impressed by Obormot's ~400AD finish date. In the end though, I found it hard to maintain motivation to really plan in that much detail as the prince difficulty didn't really give much sense of challenge.
The BtS AI is definitely a more challenging miltary opponent though than earlier versions (in defence anyway). It'll be interesting to see how it attacks, when we get around to playing at the harder difficulty levels. Sounds like we can expect some big stacks, from what I've read elsewhere on the forum.
Got caught out by one of the random events right at the end: 'Russian soliders have shown unexpected mercy to our wounded...'
The options were
- 'Ha! Send out troops back to fight as soon as possible'
- 'Send emissiaries to discuss the possiblity of peace. (+1 relations boost with Stalin).'
There was no explicit mention of peace so I chose the second option and then found myself locked into a 10 turn peace treaty with Stalin! About 6 turns before I was about to finish wiping out his cities to reach the domination limit...
So this cost me about 10 turns at the end.Very impressed by Obormot's ~400AD finish date. In the end though, I found it hard to maintain motivation to really plan in that much detail as the prince difficulty didn't really give much sense of challenge.
The BtS AI is definitely a more challenging miltary opponent though than earlier versions (in defence anyway). It'll be interesting to see how it attacks, when we get around to playing at the harder difficulty levels. Sounds like we can expect some big stacks, from what I've read elsewhere on the forum.
MarkM
Cow Herder
FYI if you hover the mouse over each option text you should get a tooltip that tells you the real meaning of each choice in game terms (i.e. it would have told you it would cause a peace treaty to be signed)Finally finished - what a slog that was!
Got caught out by one of the random events right at the end: 'Russian soliders have shown unexpected mercy to our wounded...'
The options were
- 'Ha! Send out troops back to fight as soon as possible'
- 'Send emissiaries to discuss the possiblity of peace. (+1 relations boost with Stalin).'
There was no explicit mention of peace so I chose the second option and then found myself locked into a 10 turn peace treaty with Stalin! About 6 turns before I was about to finish wiping out his cities to reach the domination limit...
Yeah I see other XOTM players who say they are just starting to play BTS now say the same thing (e.g. I think that's what Erkon was implying).The BtS AI is definitely a more challenging miltary opponent though than earlier versions (in defence anyway). It'll be interesting to see how it attacks, when we get around to playing at the harder difficulty levels. Sounds like we can expect some big stacks, from what I've read elsewhere on the forum.
I'm afraid some people were taking my comments in the "How many XTOM" and "slay the noble warlord?" poll threads the wrong way, where I said that I didn't believe WOTM should have the same XOTM status as either BTS or vanilla anymore, eg.:
I just wondered if a lot of the WOTM support was only because many hadn't played BTS yet. Again, for the record, I am completely happy with the schedule chosen. We got what I wanted: I probably only want to play BTS, unless there is some really intriguing game combinations in the other series, and I get that every month. And we got what I thought the XOTM series needed: another monthly game that was "lowest common denominator" (doesn't require expansions) -- some proposals wouldn't have given that. As a probably BTS-only player it made no difference to me personally, I was genuinely trying to think of the community when I said things that were interpreted to knock Warlords. But I sincerely suspected most would find themselves to be like me, "once you try BTS, you don't want to go back." I know that's an over interpretation of what you & others are posting here, but I hope you at least can now see where I was coming from, even if you don't agree.
petersc
Chieftain
I have made the same mistake that Munro made. I think the tooltip text was only what he had in parenthesis (+1 relations boost with Stalin). No mention of signing a peace treaty. My guess is that's what the option text itself is saying, just wasn't crystal clear the first time.
MarkM
Cow Herder
Oh OK, could be. My comment was just directed to the general case, I don't think I've ever gotten this specific event. Sounds like something that needs to be tweaked in XML in a patch/HOF mod ... thanks for the heads up, both of you, to look out for that!I have made the same mistake that Munro made. I think the tooltip text was only what he had in parenthesis (+1 relations boost with Stalin). No mention of signing a peace treaty. My guess is that's what the option text itself is saying, just wasn't crystal clear the first time.
Harok
Vagabond
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2005
- Messages
- 271
With random events on BTS is my least favorite version, turning them off however would make it my favorite.
Munro
Deity
I hope so. This is what happened to me with Warlords. The new features were fine (especially the warlords themselves), but the single biggest factor was the improved AI. I just didn't want to play vanilla civ any more (even the GOTM) because the AI just seemed so naive and exploitable.
Looks like the BtS AI may be a simliar step-up and that can only be a good thing.
da_Vinci
Gypsy Prince
I could be remembering wrong, but I think I have had this go both ways (peace treaty and no peace treaty), so maybe there is an RNG roll for peace or no peace?Got caught out by one of the random events right at the end: 'Russian soliders have shown unexpected mercy to our wounded...'
The options were
- 'Ha! Send out troops back to fight as soon as possible'
- 'Send emissiaries to discuss the possiblity of peace. (+1 relations boost with Stalin).'
There was no explicit mention of peace so I chose the second option and then found myself locked into a 10 turn peace treaty with Stalin! About 6 turns before I was about to finish wiping out his cities to reach the domination limit...
dV
chunkymonkey
Procrastinator
This was my first game with BTS, I had planned to get some practice games in first so I could learn about all the new features and the new tech tree, but RL kept getting in the way so this would have to be my introduction! I decided I would go for Space since I wanted to try out a longish game to get used to the new mid-late game aspects.
So, starting off, I settled on the plains hill and built a worker first. Started research on AH for the beef. Met Churchill but decide not to take him just yet since I wanted to test out Espionage on him. Make first priority the Great Wall so I don't have to worry about the barbs.
After that was built, I went for the CS sling which I figured doable since the others would be teching slowly. Achieved in 485BC, switched to Bureaucracy then set about on the long tech path to Fusion!
Confucianism spread around my empire without the use of missionaries, and spread to others too with Russia and England converting. I built a few wonders on the way to speed me up. In fact I built a lot of wonders just because I could and had nothing else to build. As a result I ended up with loads of Great People (for a CE game) and ended up burning ten of them on 4 golden ages!! Added to the Taj Mahal GA I was in a golden age for practically the last 40 turns of the game - I wish i had built the Mausoleum now!!
Three wars - I declared war on Churchill in 155BC, and razed York because it was in a stupid place and put my own city nearby. I declared again in 340AD to take London and Nottingham, and finally in 1625AD just for fun and it's odd for me to not have a vassal by this point in the game.
The other civs didn't bother me all throughout the game. When I got Privateers i effectively crippled them, they spent time spamming caravels and suiciding them whilst I pulled in the $$$.
I found Espionage unnecessary in this game, since the others weren't teching at all, i believe they had only reached rifles when I finished. Didn't try corporations either because I wanted to use my great people on golden ages and was worried that the maintenance would slow me since I wouldn't have really known what I was doing.
Random Events were a non-entity for me - i got a couple of nice little bonuses and a couple of crappy events but nothing game-breaking. I'm not sure if I like them in GOTM (especially if I end up with a nasty one next game!) but they do add a little bit of interest i guess.
By the end of the game it was just a case of synchronising my research of the final space techs with the conversion of all my towns in my two production powerhouses into workshops. I managed to get both my Engines to complete on the same day and launched the spaceship. 1814 win.
Here are some detailed timelines if anybody is interested...
Cities:
Wonders:
Spaceship Parts:
Great People:
Ancient Age Techs:
Middle Age Techs:
Industrial Age Techs:
Modern Age Techs:
So, starting off, I settled on the plains hill and built a worker first. Started research on AH for the beef. Met Churchill but decide not to take him just yet since I wanted to test out Espionage on him. Make first priority the Great Wall so I don't have to worry about the barbs.
After that was built, I went for the CS sling which I figured doable since the others would be teching slowly. Achieved in 485BC, switched to Bureaucracy then set about on the long tech path to Fusion!
Confucianism spread around my empire without the use of missionaries, and spread to others too with Russia and England converting. I built a few wonders on the way to speed me up. In fact I built a lot of wonders just because I could and had nothing else to build. As a result I ended up with loads of Great People (for a CE game) and ended up burning ten of them on 4 golden ages!! Added to the Taj Mahal GA I was in a golden age for practically the last 40 turns of the game - I wish i had built the Mausoleum now!!
Three wars - I declared war on Churchill in 155BC, and razed York because it was in a stupid place and put my own city nearby. I declared again in 340AD to take London and Nottingham, and finally in 1625AD just for fun and it's odd for me to not have a vassal by this point in the game.
The other civs didn't bother me all throughout the game. When I got Privateers i effectively crippled them, they spent time spamming caravels and suiciding them whilst I pulled in the $$$.
I found Espionage unnecessary in this game, since the others weren't teching at all, i believe they had only reached rifles when I finished. Didn't try corporations either because I wanted to use my great people on golden ages and was worried that the maintenance would slow me since I wouldn't have really known what I was doing.
Random Events were a non-entity for me - i got a couple of nice little bonuses and a couple of crappy events but nothing game-breaking. I'm not sure if I like them in GOTM (especially if I end up with a nasty one next game!) but they do add a little bit of interest i guess.
By the end of the game it was just a case of synchronising my research of the final space techs with the conversion of all my towns in my two production powerhouses into workshops. I managed to get both my Engines to complete on the same day and launched the spaceship. 1814 win.
Here are some detailed timelines if anybody is interested...
Cities:
Spoiler :
Wonders:
Spoiler :
Spaceship Parts:
Spoiler :
Great People:
Spoiler :
Ancient Age Techs:
Spoiler :
Middle Age Techs:
Spoiler :
Industrial Age Techs:
Spoiler :
Modern Age Techs:
Spoiler :
Congrats on your win.
How do you get money from privateers, please? You just get them close to a city and press the "cannon" icon? How do you know if there is intercontinental trade through that tile?
And how much do you make that way?
chunkymonkey
Procrastinator
I only tried it after reading everybody's discussion in the other forums otherwise I would have had no idea how it worked.
Basically, yes you're right, just station a privateer within 3-4 sea tiles of a city and press the blockade icon. If you go back to that unit and click on it, it should show you a shaded area which the privateer is covering (although sometimes difficult to see if your civ colour is a similar colour to the sea!). I think to blockade a city the shaded area has to be covering all exits from the city although I may be wrong. From what I have experienced, you can blockade multiple towns if you choose the correct spot.
I was getting 2 gold per turn per city blockaded. Although 1 city gave me 3 gold per turn, so I assume this has something to do with trade modifiers/ number of trade routes in the city? I guess this doesn't sound like a lot - i was probably getting 15-20 gpt from this, but the greatest effect was that the AI just kept building caravels in the blockaded cities. If you can do this to a civ before they get galleons it's almost an exploit i think.
I'm not sure if there necessarily has to be intercontinental trade in the city, but I guess on this map every coastal city had it because everywhere was connected by coast.
MarkM
Cow Herder
I actually like random events for a "pickup" game, but you're right for BOTM they have potentially at least as much impact as goodie huts (which have been turned off). I thought they had been turned off/tuned down a lot -- through almost two full BOTM games now, 1 & 2, I have had zero quests, for example, not have I gotten any random events that woudl give me any combat bonuses, I think mine have all been of the "you get +1 coin from one tile" variety, so pretty irrelevant -- -- but apparently this was just my "bad luck" as others report getting quests, combat bonuses, etc. If someone were to start a poll to ask if random events should be turned off in BTS, I would vote yes too.
dalamb
Deity
I like random events and goody huts, but for xOTMs and anything else where you want to compare one person against another, they're "too random". There is a way around this, probably buried too deep to change, but: if you keep the sequence of random numbers for events separate from all the other random numbers, then the xOTM creator could conceivably set the 'seed' for this separate sequence as part of creating the save file, and everyone would get the same sequence of numbers and so the same sequence of events.
I've had to do something similar when testing other programs involving RNGs: a "hidden, developer-only" option to set the seed so testing could be "random" but repeatable.
This requires having separate data structures for two different random number sequences; some implementation languages' libraries only allow for one. Java happens to allow for arbitrarily many; I haven't looked to see if Python does, nor do I have any idea whether the RNG and event handler are accessible from Python.
You can 'fix' the goodie huts by assigning their contents at map creation time instead of as the game runs, but once again I have no idea how hard that is to do.
I've had to do something similar when testing other programs involving RNGs: a "hidden, developer-only" option to set the seed so testing could be "random" but repeatable.
This requires having separate data structures for two different random number sequences; some implementation languages' libraries only allow for one. Java happens to allow for arbitrarily many; I haven't looked to see if Python does, nor do I have any idea whether the RNG and event handler are accessible from Python.
You can 'fix' the goodie huts by assigning their contents at map creation time instead of as the game runs, but once again I have no idea how hard that is to do.
Dalamb,
I dont see how that would work here... The different random events and quests have certain preconditions to make them available (researching a tech, having certain units, etc...). Since these triggers will happen in different orders in different games, even with a set seed for random events, the events will end up different for different people.
I dont see how that would work here... The different random events and quests have certain preconditions to make them available (researching a tech, having certain units, etc...). Since these triggers will happen in different orders in different games, even with a set seed for random events, the events will end up different for different people.
the HOF mod turned off all the combat bonus random events, and goodie huts are not always turned off(I turned them off because I don't know how to remove them from the map 
)
I happen to think that leaving random events on is part of the BtS package, and thus far, we've seen precious few events even mentioned, much less anything game-breaking.
As for how random events occur, a set number of them(perhaps 30-ish) are chosen as possibilities at the time the save is created(thus, everyone in the BOTM has the same set of possible random events). From there, the random seed that determines everything else in the game that somehow ends up differently for each player is also what determines what random events occur and when for each player.
So on one hand, it is 'regulated' so that everyone could get the exact same random events. On the other hand, because every game turns out differently, those random events may or may not happen at the same time, in the same order, or even at all.
)I happen to think that leaving random events on is part of the BtS package, and thus far, we've seen precious few events even mentioned, much less anything game-breaking.
As for how random events occur, a set number of them(perhaps 30-ish) are chosen as possibilities at the time the save is created(thus, everyone in the BOTM has the same set of possible random events). From there, the random seed that determines everything else in the game that somehow ends up differently for each player is also what determines what random events occur and when for each player.
So on one hand, it is 'regulated' so that everyone could get the exact same random events. On the other hand, because every game turns out differently, those random events may or may not happen at the same time, in the same order, or even at all.
azzaman333
meh
It's much more gamebreaking to have a mine pop a resources, like gems, which happened in my game within the first 80 turns. Keep Random Events, they're only in the BotM and if you don't like them you can always play the WotM or the GotM.
dalamb
Deity
I should have realized that, from when I noted that the slave revolt only happens if you're running slavery. So, that half of the idea fails, but what about the goody huts?
I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't really be possible either. Aside from the fact that goody huts have not had any real impact on most games since the first couple GOTM, it would take a whole lot longer to create these games if we had to go through and set every goody hut to not have a random seed(if it is even based on any random seed other than the one everything else is based on)
But despite that obstacle, you can make goody huts exactly the same for everyone because everone plays differently...what if we set a goody hut to give everyone pottery. What would you do if someone had already researched pottery? Give them cash? Suddenly they got the raw end of the deal. Goody huts are fine the way they are, and since everyone has exactly the same possibilities for random events, I think that they are perfectly fine the way they are.
Consider random events to be part of the flavor of BtS. We may have a game without them sometime, but I see no reason to disallow them.
But despite that obstacle, you can make goody huts exactly the same for everyone because everone plays differently...what if we set a goody hut to give everyone pottery. What would you do if someone had already researched pottery? Give them cash? Suddenly they got the raw end of the deal. Goody huts are fine the way they are, and since everyone has exactly the same possibilities for random events, I think that they are perfectly fine the way they are.
Consider random events to be part of the flavor of BtS. We may have a game without them sometime, but I see no reason to disallow them.
Offhand I can't recall ever seeing any option in worldbuilder that allows you to do that?? If it were possible, that could be useful, though I'm not quite sure how it could work (what happens if you set a goody hut to generate hostile barbs, but it gets opened by a scout that by definition can't give you those?) and it would still be random to the extent that you don't know upfront which huts will be found by the human player and which by the AI.
MarkM
Cow Herder
FWIW I think you did the best thing, however inadvertent the reasoning that led to it. It's not a huge deal if they are there, but I do think it's a bit better for a xOTM when they're turned off completely.the HOF mod turned off all the combat bonus random events, and goodie huts are not always turned off(I turned them off because I don't know how to remove them from the map
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